Partner Content

3 Steps to Build Customer Relationships

As brand marketers place more time and effort into making their email marketing communications more effective, the importance of getting as close as possible to a 1:1 connection with consumers becomes readily apparent. The key to establishing what I like to refer to as a “real” connection with your consumer goes beyond indiscriminately dropping your consumer lists into existing marketing campaigns.

In order for connections with consumer audiences to be effective, these connections have to be viewed as relationships. These relationships have to be nurtured and constantly developed over a period of time. The best way to establish a strong relationship with consumers is through a brand’s lifecycle messaging. Lifecycle messaging at its core is more digestible when broken up into a phased approach, knowing that over the course of a member’s journey with your brand your members and brand advocates go through varying life stages. In this piece, we dive into how exactly to get there – appropriately.

The one critical moment that a brand has to establish or create a lasting impression, develop a strong brand identity, and create awareness about their brand with the consumer starts at the very beginning: with the first message. That first message should in fact be the Welcome message. This is a phase that I aptly refer to as the courtship. Using email as one of the most intimate touch points of customer interaction, let’s outline some steps in cultivating a successful welcome experience.

Step 1 – Identify the Challenge
Maybe your email marketing program has a welcome message. Maybe it doesn’t. In the event your program does in fact include a welcome program, examine just how effective it is. Does that program only consist of one message before then folding your program’s recipients into the remainder of your marketing messages?

Retailers that don’t make the assumption that their audience knows everything about their brand and offerings tend to have better performing welcome programs.

ü Develop a Series of Messages

Create a culture of learning by developing a series of messages that specifically caters to new customers. A series of succinct messaging can be very powerful in reinforcing a brand’s unique value proposition. It can also help establish and educate those members of the audience who will ultimately grow to become loyalists or brand advocates.

ü Seize the Opportunity to Reinforce Your Branding

A welcome message is an excellent way to emphasize your product offerings and cross-promote your family of brands. When a member signs up for your loyalty rewards program or requests additional information, take the extra step to ensure that the overall messaging reflects where the recipient likely discovered your brand. A hotel chain could easily accomplish this by adding its property’s brand logo in a prominent area of the message. By doing this, you’re not just welcoming the member to your loyalty program – you’re reinforcing and cross-promoting visibility of a property that is familiar to the recipient. As a retailer, this is easily done by incorporating your family of brand logos in the messaging, keeping in mind the varying or tiered price-point offerings, e.g. Banana Republic, The Gap and Old Navy (all within one family of brands, offering like quality products).

Step 3 – Acknowledge the Results
Understand and treat your metrics from these types of communications with the same level of weight and importance as you would with any other messages in your marketing program’s portfolio. Scrutinize and proactively test those items that correlate to your program’s performance and deliverability. Proactively think of ways that your team can ultimately promote cross-channel marketing for new members based on your retail brand’s visibility in different channels.

As stated at the beginning, the beauty of the courtshiplies within the nurturing of the consumer relationship with your retail brand. By going the extra mile and making an effort in positioning and proactively exposing your brand’s unique value proposition, you open the door to not only creating a great experience for your new member audience – you create a lasting impression by cultivating a culture of learning and a strong brand identity. It’s a win-win. Doing some or all of these things will take the level of your programs up a notch and also create new advocates who will be invaluable in extending your brand to new audiences.